christmas project - passage of time

{06/12/13 - 06/01/14}
During the Christmas holidays I was assigned to a project called 'Passage of time' in which I explore an aspect of time or a specific period of time and then to create methoda of communicating this. An understanding of the concept of time passing, an ability to summarise this in an image or series.

'Time constantly passes and affects human lives; the lives of our predecessors, our own lives and the lives of generations to come. We have many different ways of measuring time from the passage of day and night. In this project, we want you to choose a period of time and to devise a method of communicating this. You may want to explore this on a grand scale (e.g. the age of the earth and our time on it) or on a micro scale (e.g. how a minute is split into seconds and microseconds).

To start you thinking, consider the following: 

• ways of recording time e.g. sundials, clocks, watches, carbon dating 
• generations of a family 
• the relationship of seconds/minutes/hours/days/months/years 
• time marked by historic events 
• the age of the universe or the earth 
• the cycle of the seasons

You can use any graphic medium or mixture of media to illustrate your concept e.g. illustration, type, photography, graphs etc. The final result can be an illustration, a poster, a collage or a diagram.'

With the help of the project brief, I  was able to generate new ideas and add on details on things mentioned already. My first step was to create an brainstorm which will help me have a more detailed insight of different ways to reflect passage of time. It was too board to pick out a certain topic of choice without exploring the variety of ways to represent it.

I really like the idea of generation and so created another brainstorm with generation as the main topic, I thought it would be interesting to show the difference between ages and appearance. 

At this point it was difficult for me to decide how to present because I didn't want it to be generic and so I looked at a Singapore-based photographer Fong Qi Wei. His series called 'Time is a Dimension' are mostly landscapes, seascapes and cityscapes, and they are a single composite made from sequences that span 2-4 hours, mostly of sunrises and sunsets. The basic structure of a landscape is present in every piece. But each panel or concentric layer shows a different slice of time, which is related to the adjacent panel/layer. The transition from daytime to night is gradual and noticeable in every piece, but would not be something you expect to see in a still image.

"Photographic prints are great because they don’t need power to be displayed. They are more or less permanent. Videos are great because they record a sequence of time which shows reality almost like how we experience. Is it possible to combine the two? And not via long exposure photography where often details are lost from motion. So I played around with the tools of digital photography and post processing to give you this series: Time is a dimension."

I really like how he captures the essences of passage of time by using the data (photographs of the same place to keeps it consistent and show a true comparsion with time). He plays around with the shape of each photograph to add an addtional effect to enhance the photographs, intimating the sun rays and a source of light or darkness. It was fascinated to create my own with my images of my mum and me.

I placed the two images onto Photoshop and overlapped and adjusted the right rotation and size, I was influenced with the circular shape of Fong Qi Wei, at first I didn't like it because the background didn't match well but in the end I kept it the same since it wasn't the main focus. I cut of some circles on one layer to allow the image to seep through and blend naturally. I also experimented with other blending options to further enhance and blend it seemlessly.

This time I done a design very similiar to the artist, I prefer this over the other attempts because it crops out the unnecessary background space and focus more on difference of my mums and my features combined. I think I was successful in terms of matching the right angle and to each other and also the different and inconsistent circles show the differences between us and how we can agree and disagree on many things.